navajo

Frank Stokes, of The Awakening Live jazz band, plays for the marathon runners and crowds in Bay Ridge. Photo by Chelsia Marcius

As bass player Frank Stokes strummed his guitar strings for passing marathon runners, one athlete sporting a blue-and-white Italia spandex shirt sprang from the crowd, threw his arm around Stokes and smiled for a snapshot.

Giving a quick glance at the camera’s preview screen, the runner laughed out loud at the picture — a candid of him and the Navajo musician with long, straggly hair — before bounding back into the crowd and disappearing into the blur of color.

Parked in front of a Gulf gas station near the corner of Fourth Avenue and Senator Street in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn, Stokes, 56, and other members of The Awakening Live jazz band jammed between miles two and four of today’s New York City Marathon.

In the last 22 years, he has never missed a race.

“We’ve been through a lot of tragedy. A lot has happened here, and I have to support my city,” said Stokes, who was born and raised in Brooklyn and remembers the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks. “New York needs us.”

Marathon supporters stopped often to greet Stokes, whose style and dress — including his horseshoe mustache and the string of off-white buffalo bone beads around his neck — make him a memorable marathon performer in Bay Ridge.

“As soon as my husband heard the music, he said, ‘I hope it’s the same band from eight years ago,” said Maria Devito, who lives just two blocks away from the gas station along the marathon path but has not been to the race since 2002. “They’re one of the greatest bands here.”

But Stokes said he’s not there to promote himself or the band; his mission is to keep up runners’ morale. A dream catcher of eagle feathers hangs from the handle of his guitar for good luck. Before playing, he burned sage leaves — a Navajo ritual meant to bring about positive energy. And Stokes said in years past, he has continued to play for runners even through pouring rain and frostbitten hands.

“We get them to the next band,” he said. “We’ve got to show them love, and we know this works. We got to get them through these first couple of miles. It’s a long race.”

A group of members of the Forgotten People gather in a house at Black Falls, Ariz., near the uranium-contaminated Box Springs well. Photo by Rachel Wise.

On the side of Gray Mountain in Northeast Arizona, Lorraine Curley lives alone in a two-room concrete home. Her roof is tarpaper and tin, and her bathroom is a wooden outhouse 50 feet from her door. Living without electricity or water is a way of life for Curley; she has, after all, been restricted by the Bennett Freeze, a law enacted in 1966 and not lifted until last May. Because of that law, more than 18,000 Americans were restricted from making any repairs to their homes or from building new ones for 43 years.

Curley would like a new home, but she’s not picky: It doesn’t need to have electricity or running water – a floor and insulation would be nice.

“Maybe I’ll never see a home,” she said.

And at 79 years old, Curley is running out of time.

Curley is Diné, or Navajo, and like more than 180,000 others in her tribe, she lives on the reservation known as Navajo Nation, which spans a sprawling 27,000 miles stretched across Arizona, New Mexico and Utah. The land is also rich in highly sought-after natural resources, like coal and uranium, which has proven to be both a blessing and a curse. With its vast and breathtaking sandstone vistas and scrubby desert floor, the territory includes some of the prettiest land in America, but its people, scattered throughout, are without a doubt some of the country’s most desperately underserved.

Because of its sovereign status, Indian territory is not regulated by federal environmental standards. In addition to oil and natural-gas drilling, the Nation was subjected to uranium mining from 1944 through 1986, when almost 4 tons of uranium ore was extracted for use in the arsenal build-up of the Cold War. It was mined without regard to the safety of the miners, the nearby residents or even the mineral-rich land itself, resulting in the inevitable pollution of the air and water. As a consequence, the land they treasure so deeply has turned against the Navajo people, many of whom have developed severe health problems from drinking contaminated water and breathing contaminated air.

And then there’s the coal.

Since the mid-20th century, coal has been the primary source of energy for electricity-generating power plants around the world. Regardless of how it is measured, coal mining, and the processing of converting coal into electricity, has proved to have a devastating environmental impact. Coal mining pollutes land and seeps into groundwater, while emissions from burning coal have been cited as one of the main sources of global warming. Currently, there are five coal mines on Navajo land, and two companies are fighting to open up two more — Black Mesa (which was closed in 2005) and Desert Rock.

Sithe Global, the multinational corporation looking to open Desert Rock, says the Navajo stand to make $52 million a year from the power plant in addition to the income from new jobs. But in reality, with more than 90,000 unemployed and thousands more underemployed, the Desert Rock plant will barely make a dent, employing only 300 workers. And although it is promoted as “clean coal,” a report by the Sierra Club estimates the emissions will poison the air, soil and water forever with toxic chemicals including carbon dioxide, sulfur dioxide, nitrogen oxides and solid waste containing cadmium, selenium, arsenic and lead.

Coal mining on the reservation is a thorny and multilayered issue. While coal companies, such as Sithe Global and Peabody Coal, are eager to build or reopen coal-fired power plants, both non-native and native environmental groups like San Juan Alliance and Diné CARE (Concerned Citizens Against Ruining Our Environment) warn of the disastrous impact of the projects. The president of the Navajo Nation government, Joe Shirley Jr., has sided with the coal companies, but the Navajo people themselves remain divided while bombarded with conflicting opinions.

Last month, Shirley issued a statement supporting future coal development in the Nation and targeting environmentalists. In part, he said, “The only people who say the project (Desert Rock) will not or cannot be permitted are environment activists … who claim to put the welfare of fish and insects above the survival of the Navajo people when in fact their only goal is to stop the use of coal in U.S. and the Navajo Nation.”

Frank Maisano, a spokesperson with Bracewell Giuliani, a Texas law firm who represents Sithe Global, put it succinctly: “Frankly, the Navajo Nation is sitting on two hundred years of coal.”

There are roughly 40,000 occupied homes on the reservation. With rare exception, the Navajo homes are not served by the reservation’s power plants, leaving 18,000 homes without electricity. These homes are heated with wood stoves. The Nation is cut through with massive power transmission lines, which bypass but pass next to crumbling hogans (a traditional adobe Navajo dwelling), dilapidated trailers and one-room shacks. Those power lines run energy to cities in the Southwest, some of southern California and all of Las Vegas.

With its wealth of natural resources, it would be easy to imagine the people of Navajo Nation are wealthy beyond their wildest dreams. But the tragic irony is that many are excruciatingly poor, having derived no profit, in personal terms, from any of the bounty of their land. There is a common misconception that the Navajo actually own the land on which they live, but in fact they don’t, which means they have no control, ultimately, over how it is managed, even though they have lived on the land for hundreds of generations. Rather, it is held in trust by the U.S. government (or “in reserve,” thus the term “reservation”).

To complicate matters, there are dozens of laws on the books, which further complicate the rights and responsibilities of the federal government, the Navajo government and the people themselves. For example, an 1872 Mining Law opened the land to mining with no oversight, even permitting mining on private land. In addition, oil and gas leases were made possible by the Indian Reorganization Act of 1934, when industry, in partnership with Washington, created the opening of lands to thousands to make mining claims without compensation to the indigenous people.

That arrangement has kept the Navajo people in a form of patriarchal colonialism since 1868 when the first treaty was signed. Unable to manage the land themselves they were at the mercy of the U.S. government and its agreements with industry.

“I strongly believe it’s time, it’s due — people deserve compensation,” said Carol Colorado during a recent meeting of the Forgotten People, a community development corporation concentrated in the Western part of the reservation.

According to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, because of regulated uranium mining and abandoned mines, there are “homes and drinking water sources (in the Navajo Nation) with elevated levels of radiation. Potential health effects include lung cancer from inhalation of radioactive particles, as well as bone cancer and impaired kidney function from exposure to radionuclides in drinking water.”

Colorado and about 30 cohorts met at a home in Black Falls, near Box Spring, a well of clear, cold water — rendered toxic from years of mining.

“There was neglect, no public outreach,” Colorado said. “Contamination was kept from people; they sat on that information of contaminated wells.”

Earl Tulley fills containers with uranium-contaminated drinking water at Box Spring well in Black Falls, Ariz. Photo by Rachel Wise

Activists say there are more than 1,200 abandoned mines in the Nation (although the Abandoned Land Mine Office consolidates that number closer to 500). The uranium-mining companies are long gone, but the contamination remains.

“Exploiting indigenous people is one of the hallmarks of state corporate crime,” said Linda Robyn, a Chippewa Indian and professor of criminology and criminal justice at Northern Arizona University, who is studying the link between corporate-government complicity in environmental disregard for the Navajo’s well being. “Navajos are really, really poor with astronomical unemployment, substandard health care, drug abuse. It is a good place for corporations to exploit the people.”

Robyn says, to her knowledge, no corporate entity has ever been prosecuted for uranium contamination on Navajo soil, and yet as far back as the 1930s there was an awareness of the health risks associated with uranium. Somehow the message never made it to the Navajo. As recently as the 1980s — half a century later — U.S.E.P.A. scientists were putting Geiger counters to the wall of hogans near abandoned mines to measure radiation and seeing readings that were off the charts.

Florabell Paddock, 76, attended the Forgotten People meeting with her companion of 40 years, Jerry Huskon, 68. Like the thousands of others in the Western Navajo Nation, Paddock, a tiny, frail woman, has never had running water, instead having to haul heavy jugs from a nearby well to her home — something she won’t physically be able to do for much longer. And like so many others, her ailments are multiple.

“I drank water from the Tochachi Spring,” she said in her native Navajo, interpreted by the president of the Forgotten People, Don Yellowman. “My doctor told me my gall bladder was not working and I had internal bleeding. I have asthma, seizures, a problem with lung and liver,” she added, alluding to the cancer that has spread throughout her body.

Pauline Lefthand, 41, also came to the meeting, albeit slowly and with help from a daughter on one arm and her husband on the other. She sat heavily in a metal chair and often nodded off during the meeting. She takes 15 pills a day, including strong painkillers.

“We did. We drank a lot of water from the well. That’s what we lived on. It’s one of the best waters,” she said, referring to the cool, refreshing taste of the water, which nonetheless was poisoned by the tasteless, odorless radionuclides.

Ten years ago, Lefthand began going “downhill.” Her legs became purple and swollen. She went to a doctor who told her that both her kidneys were “gone.”

“I went on dialysis,” Lefthand recalled. “I have arthritis, I have had my bladder and appendix removed. I had stomach surgery; they took my large intestines out.”

The medicine she is prescribed also has taken its toll.

“When I started, I weighed 135 pounds, then I went up to 247 pounds. Now I weigh 192,” she said.

Lefthand’s daughter Deidre Walker, 18, was there to support her mother, whom she said has had “kidney failure, diabetes, seizures” since Walker was eight years old. Two years ago, Walker gave her mother one of her own kidneys.

Despite decades of contamination, the U.S.E.P.A. began posting warning signs on drinking wells and in local post offices three years ago. Other education has been more grassroots, such as the recent community meeting. Local and national environmental groups are actively reaching out to educate Navajos about the drinking water and to build a consensus against new coal mining and power plants.

Those environmental groups came under fire last week by the tribal council of Hopi Nation (which is surrounded by the Navajo Nation) who voted 12-0 to ban outside environmentalist including the Sierra Club, Natural Resources Defense Council, National Park Conservation Association and the Grand Canyon Trust groups from Hopi territory altogether.

“I stand with the ban and with the Hopi Nation,” said Navajo President Shirley in a news release. “Unlike ever before, environmental activists and organizations are among the greatest threat to tribal sovereignty, tribal self-determination, and our quest for independence.”

Local Navajo environmental groups say they don’t appreciate the censorship.

“The thing is, the question to ask is does President Shirley believe we are not capable of thinking and acting for ourselves?” said Earl Tulley, vice president of Diné CARE. “Does he believe we are controlled by outside groups?”

The struggle between environmentalists and corporations runs deep within the reservation. While environmentalists strive to educate residents about the risks of uranium exposure and strive to end coal mining, the corporations looking to mine the land fight back.

“The Desert Rock power plant should be built because there is an economic need in the region,” said Maisano, the spokesperson for Sithe Global. “And because it is a more efficient power plant than what exists. The Navajo Nation should be able to do this because of sovereignty. This is what they want to do.”

The Navajo Nation is divided into councils which voted 71-8 in February to approve the right-of-way legislation for Desert Rock. But last month the U.S.E.P.A. issued a remand against the mine until more air emission studies can be completed.

Along with the environmental and health challenges faced by the Navajo Nation, there has existed for many years a stigmatizing law further crippling development. Named for U.S. Commissioner of Indian Affairs Robert Bennett, the Bennett Freeze, enacted in 1966, restricted construction on more than 10 million acres of Hopi-Navajo disputed land. By law, no construction, additions or repairs could be made to any homes in the area, which covered 19 chapters — local governments — of the 110 chapters that make up Navajo land.

The law was originally intended as a temporary measure to prevent either tribe from claiming land that wasn’t theirs until the division of the land was resolved. But the ban lasted 43 years, leaving thousands of Navajo without the means to make much-needed home repairs or to build new housing as needed, essentially crippling the people trapped within the Bennett Freeze. The Freeze was lifted by President Obama on May 8, 43 years later. But, most houses are now beyond repair. The long-standing restriction has taken a huge financial toll.

The Navajo territory, at 27,000 square miles, has only 2,000 miles of paved road and many more thousands of miles of unpaved, dirt roads, much of which are only accessible by foot or on horseback.

“We need $3 billion for infrastructure, and nowhere near that will be coming in,” said Patrick Sandoval, chief of staff for the office of the president and vice president. “We will always be behind.”

That lack of infrastructure, along with tens of thousands of homes that remain “off the grid” without running water and electricity, has essentially locked those within the parameters of the reservation into poverty, and over the years, a collective and growing despair.

“You can’t fix it with plastic or duct tape,” said John Benally, a sheepherder who lives in the area restricted by the Bennett Freeze. “You have to have respect.”

With more than half of the Diné people living below the poverty line, and just as many unemployed, mental-health specialist Lusita Johnson sees a lot of depression.

“Many people tell me they can’t sleep, they have purposeless lives,” she said. “They can’t get up. Their lives don’t have meaning.”

Still, Lorraine Curley, the elderly woman on Gray Mountain, holds on to hope for a new home. She spoke to reporters outside her house recently as dusk settled and several coyotes meandered past. A hundred yards to the south, massive power lines sizzled across the million-dollar desert view. She had been to check on her housing application, she said, and the news was not good. She was told her application needed to be resubmitted. Next, she has to commission an archeological survey. And last, there is a two-year wait for a new house — but that doesn’t mean they’ll be money to build, even then.

Lurene Curley's house. Photo by Rachel Wise

“We’re just being led on, nothing ever happens. They just keep asking for documents,” she said, as the sun set behind the gray mountain.

Dressed head-to-toe in dark blue denim and black cowboy boots, topped off with a black cowboy hat, he pointed out the new floorboard that covered the hole where snakes and scorpions once slithered inside.

Thanks to housing activists Dwayne Jordan and Jesse Begay, he has a new ceiling that no longer leaks. The house is just large enough for a tiny stove, a twin-sized bed and a small, old-fashioned wood-burning stove.

Every inch of the space — the walls, ceiling and floor — is covered in personal possessions. A kerosene lamp sat on a dresser, which is crammed into the space at the foot of his bed; a bath towel and washcloth hang from a clothesline strung from a ceiling barely 6-feet tall; a fly swatter rests by the door, above a “Welcome” map covered in desert dust.

But winter is coming soon, with temperatures expected to fall well below zero and snowfall likely to pile up several feet at a time. And a few weeks ago, Shorty received a letter from his local chapter house, denying him government-subsidized weatherization. The reason, he said, is because the Navajo Housing Authority is building him a new home, which is good news, except he’s heard that same promise every year for the past 42 years.

“I’ve lost count of how many times I’ve been given the run-around,” Shorty said in Navajo, translated by Navajo guide Jesse Begay. “They’ve been here so many times, measuring this, measuring that.”

Harry Shorty holds up the letter from his local chapter house denying him government-subsidized weatherization.

Across the Navajo Nation, thousands of people live like Shorty, in 20,000 substandard homes that lack basic utilities such as plumbing, electricity or weatherization.

Christina Navajo has lived in a single-room house with her husband and four children for two and a half years. Their one room serves as the kitchen, dining room, living room and bedroom.

Still, the one room is an improvement over what they once had.

Christina Navajo and three of her children outside their home. Photo by Darren Tobia

“Before, we didn’t have a roof. The kids were cold, and I didn’t have enough blankets,” she said. “I just had to go out there and do my best to get wood.”

Barbara Begay faced a similar situation. She lived in tents and in a shade, a small shack made of wood, for months with her five children. They, too, had no electricity or running water.

But instead of waiting for government help that might never arrive, Begay decided to build her own home from the ground up.

“We knew we were going to be in need of building a home, so we started buying cinder blocks and that was eventually enough to start a foundation,” she said.

Begay’s teenage sons learned how to build a home on the Internet, logging on from school and searching the Web whenever they could.

“We started trying to figure out what size house we’re going to do, and we just went from there,” Begay said.

Barbara Begay holds up a sketch of her vision for her family’s kitchen. Photo by Darren Tobia

Begay and her children, however, were forced to sacrifice what they wanted for what they needed.

“I had my two older boys help me. They really wanted to go off to college but I kept telling them, ‘You know what? This is our focus. This is our necessity,’ ” she said. “So far, we’ve got a three-bedroom home. The wiring is done. The plumbing is in. We have running water and some minor touchups.”

For the Begay family, their sacrifices are paying off: They now have a home.

Most, however, aren’t as resourceful, especially the older generations, who are left to fend for themselves. Mary Alice Begay’s uncle, Roger, 72, froze to death in his shack in January while waiting for housing the Navajo Housing Authority promised him. Like Shorty, Roger lived in a one-room shack for years, surrounded by desert vistas and dirt roads. The NHA promised him building materials for a news home, but all he ever saw was one stack of trusses, delivered to his home and left under a tree in his yard.

Eventually, the roof of his shack caved in, and Roger was forced to move to an even smaller home. His new dwelling was made from the roof of a trailer, just big enough for a bed, with no winterization or even a wood-burning stove.

Roger was forced to move from this shack after the roof caved in. Photo by Darragh Worland

Many such as Shorty and Christina Navajo feel the NHA has failed to adequately address the housing crisis on the reservation. Substandard housing conditions are just a way of life there. The millions of dollars in Native American Housing and Self-Determination Act funds the NHA receive each year from the federal government through the department of Housing and Urban Development have had little to no impact on their lives.

According to the NHA’s own budget reports, the organization averaged about $85 million each year in funding from 1999 to 2008, but over the past 10 years, NHA has consistently fallen short of their own housing goals. Last year, NHA planned to construct 56 new rental homes. According to the NHA’s annual report, not a single new home has been built.

In Ship Rock, N.M., a remote Navajo community, an entire housing complex has been abandoned since it was constructed in 2004. The homes were near completion, but they were never certified for occupancy. As many as 3,000 homes, many of which have already been wired for electricity, with pipes for plumbing and ducts for heating, stand empty and vandalized.

“When you ask yourself how is it possible that the federal government has spent billions of dollars on Navajo housing and yet Navajos still live in squalor, this is one of the answers to that question,” said David Jordan, a lawyer who has brought cases against the NHA. “The problem of mismanagement in construction projects and abandoning projects before they’re complete shows where the money is being spent, but there’s no benefit being gained.”

Patrick Sandoval, the chief of staff for the president and vice president of Navajo Nation, said housing policies are stringent, which slows down the process.

“Not saying it’s right,” he said. “We need to work to make rules less stringent. We are doing the best that we can, but there is more that can be done.”

This story was reported by Elisa Lagos, Darren Tobia, Katy Bolger and Elizabeth Wagner

Rolanda Tahani has been drinking water from a well behind her house for decades. And just recently she was informed it has been contaminated with uranium since the 1970s. Her mysterious health problems — developing cancers and debilitating infections — finally make sense. But Tahani still has no relief, as she continues to consume the water: It’s her only source, she says.

BLUE GAP, Ariz. – As a young husband and father, Leonard Nez was proud to work in a uranium mine near his home in Blue Gap, Ariz. For the two years he worked in the mine, he made a good living for his family and was able to buy food and goods from the local trader. Because he lived so close, he even allowed the mining company to store their tools in his family’s shed. Oftentimes, he would come home with rocks so his children would see what kind of work he was doing.

But Leonard had no way of knowing that these rocks would poison his family.

Leonard Nez

“I never knew the risk I put myself in by working for the uranium,” he said in his native Navajo language, as translated by his daughter Seraphina. “I know I returned home to my family contaminated with the uranium dust. I know I brought it home to my children. There were times I brought home rocks that were uranium, and I would put it on my windowsill for my kids to see the work I was doing. But I was unaware of the risk.“

Since then, Leonard and his wife Helen have lost seven of their 11 children — all before they reached the age of 36.

Six died from Navajo Neuropathy, a rare disease caused by exposure to radiation that primarily affects Navajo children. The disease attacks the peripheral nervous system. Symptoms include the shriveling of hands and feet, muscular weakness, stunted growth, infection and corneal ulcers. Forty percent of children affected die before they reach their 20s. The seventh child died from a miscarriage.

Many Navajo children were afflicted with the disease as a result of exposure to high levels of uranium in the air and water in and around their own homes.

From the 1940s to the 1980s, nearly 4 million tons of uranium ore was mined from Navajo land as part of the United States’ effort to develop a nuclear bomb during the Cold War.

When the miners left, uranium tailings and contaminated water and air were left behind on tribal land. Like the Nezes, many Navajos were unaware of the health risks caused by exposure.

Helen, 71, and Leonard, 74, lost their first child in 1968.

“(Dorenta) never walked; she had unusual puffiness in her face, her cheeks,” Helen said through her daughter Seraphina. “And she was very thin in her extremities. Her abdominal area — her stomach — had enlarged.”

Dorenta was just 3 years old when she died.

John was born in 1967 and died in 1970; Claudia was born in 1970 and died 1972; Euphemia was born in 1975 and died in 1978.

Years later, Cedar died at the age of 36, followed by Theresa, who died at the age of 26 in 1996.

All died of Navajo Neuropathy.

“All of the symptoms were identical,” Helen said. “Today, I still agonize and think about the past. To have six children die of the same symptoms and not know what it is. … One doctor in Albuquerque said, ‘Well, if you live in some sort of contaminated area, that might be the cause.’ ”

The Nezes’ home still sits half a mile from the mouth of the abandoned uranium mine.

And the Navajo government officials say the issue is not theirs to resolve.

“This is a federal government issue,” said Patrick Sandoval, chief of staff at the office of the Navajo president and vice president. “People can always do more in every effort. The federal government should have left uranium alone. It shouldn’t have been bothered. The Navajo people didn’t know what was happening when (the miners) came in. For our part, a bigger effort could be done, but we are doing the best we can with what we have.”

Gary Garrison, public officer at the Bureau of Indian Affairs, said the BIA is not responsible either.

“The Bureau of Indian Affairs is not involved with providing outreach to the communities on this particular issue, funds for cleanup, or health care to residents of the Navajo Nation,” he said. “Those areas are being handled by other tribal and federal agencies responsible for carrying out those actions.”

As for federal government efforts, programs to clean up the contaminated areas are in place.

The Environmental Protection Agency began working to solve the problem of contaminated homes in Navajo Nation in 1994 with the Superfund program, which has provided $13 million to assess contaminated areas and develop a plan of action. In 2007, the Superfund Program finished a comprehensive atlas of each contaminated site and the level of contamination.

Since then, four yards and one home in Church Rock have been cleaned up at a cost of $2 million, paid for by the U.S. government.

In 2007, the EPA initiated the Five-Year Plan in conjunction with the BIA, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, Indian Health Services and the Department of Energy. These groups also worked closely with the Navajo EPA.

The Five-Year Plan lays out a procedure to assess the severity of the contamination and a plan of action to address it. It was the first coordinated effort of federal and local groups to deal with the problem. One of the first initiatives was to require the owner of the Church Rock mine to conduct a cleanup.

When their children first became sick, Helen and Leonard visited doctor after doctor, searching for answers.

Instead, they were faced with accusations from local doctors.

“The indication was, ‘Is there incest?’ ” Helen said. “ ‘Is your husband related to you? Is he your brother, your uncle? Is that the reason your children have these symptoms?’ They never apologize, only the speculation of incest.”

Further complicating matters, Leonard’s involvement with the mine was off the books. Miners were paid in goods and food for their families. They never received either paychecks or cash for their work. Now, there is no record whatsoever of Leonard’s time in the uranium mines.

“Working for the uranium, I was only given a piece of white slip, a piece of paper, to take to the local store to purchase food and other things,” Leonard said.

With no record of his work history, there is little hope for the Nezes to gain compensation for the loss of their children.

“My heart is broken and I blame the government,” Leonard said. “I think back now, if I didn’t expose my children to the uranium, I could have had a big family. Now I am surviving only four children. This is my biggest regret, to work for the uranium.”

He is angered at the way the Navajo Nation is treated by the federal government.

“This has been going on for quite some time,” he said. “One thing that really bothers me is we say ‘our land,’ but technically it’s not our land, this so-called Navajo Reservation. We do not own anything on it at all. Not even the land. All we got is probably three inches of topsoil. If there’s any oil, if there’s any kind of water, it belongs to the government. And yet, they contaminated the whole area. And now they’re just playing hush-hush.”

The legacy of Navajo Neuropathy spans generations in the Nez family. Helen’s great-grandson died in June of the same disease that claimed six of his aunts and uncles.

Even 17-year-old Floyd James Baldwin, Helen and Leonard’s grandson, sees what uranium has done to his family and to Navajo tribal lands.

“Well, growing up, I saw some pretty weird things,” he said. “When I was a child … getting my diaper changed next to my uncle — my own uncle, who’s a full-grown man. And I was just a little kid. I didn’t know it was wrong or anything. But as I grew up, I noticed that’s not normal. That doesn’t happen.” Loss of kidney function is another side effect of Navajo Neuropathy.

Floyd worries about the same thing happening to him. Still, he can’t imagine leaving the reservation.

“I think about (the effects of uranium on me) every time I drink anything,” he said. “(But) this is where my family’s at, and we’ve always been here. I can’t just leave this place.”

Aubrey Smith, dressed in a backward cap and a button-up T-shirt, sits back at a Navajo wedding. Photo by Lauren Gerber

April Tulley and her brother Shelby are playing the popular Playstation video game “Guitar Hero” in their guest room, arguing over which song to choose next. April has mastered the guitar, and Shelby is equally expert on the drums.

But when their grandmother comes in, they quickly stand up and hug her, greeting her in their native Navajo language.

Outside, their father Julius is cooking mutton on the grill. It’s his son Skyler’s wedding reception. But five chickens cluck away in a cage nearby, in case he wants to use them next time.

Navajo Nation, a 27,000-square-mile reservation spanning four Southwestern states that is home to 174,000 Diné (or Navajo) people, is suffering an identity crisis. The older generation yearns to hold onto authentic culture, but they struggle to instill that nostalgia in their children, who are more interested in MTV and video games.

“We are walking in two worlds,” said Marilyn Dempsey, a teacher at Oxilna’oodilii, a Navajo school in Oaks Spring, Ariz. “The family used to be self-sufficient, but now, parents have to drive to Albuquerque to work. The TV’s a babysitter. The kids want to emulate the people on TV and music. We have lost elders — the traditional, grassroot people. They know what being a Diné means.”

The Navajo’s self-sufficiency has been challenged time and again. In 1860, the U.S. Army attempted to relocate Navajo groups from eastern Arizona and western New Mexico to Fort Sumner in southeastern New Mexico. They were held prisoner there but eventually were released when the experiment, now known as the Long Walk, was deemed a failure.

During the “boarding school era,” during the ’30s, ’40s and ’50s, young children were sent to U.S. government boarding schools, where they studied in English language schools and were disconnected from their culture, often losing their Navajo language in the process. Now, many have blended in to the mainstream — speaking mostly in English, staying in tune with pop culture and seldom waking up for pre-sunrise prayer.

“This is the culture we have to survive in,” Dempsey said. “We need to be educated and understand the white man’s way and what they want us to do. We have to.”

At Skyler Tulley’s wedding, the bride and groom ate “grasshopper” fruit salad; green chili, an authentic spicy dish; and Green River watermelon, which Skyler’s mother Virginia said is the best in Arizona. They mingled as comfortably with their own grandparents, aunts and uncles, as with Mormon missionary guests, wearing Church of Latter Day Saints name tags. Skyler’s uncle gave a speech about the importance of his tribe, followed by a Lady Gaga song.

The older attendees sat at their tables quietly looking on.

“Are the kids Westernized? Look at them. Look at how they’re dressed,” said Skyler’s aunt, Sandra Help, of Rock Springs, N.M. “If they weren’t, they would not look like that. Even me, I am westernized, except for my jewelry.”

“It all depends on parents, what they taught them,” Help continued. “I think it will be like this (a mix of traditional and Westernized culture) for a long, long time.”

Life has changed beyond denim choice and hairstyle. Many young Diné people bypass morning prayers, like offering white-ground corn to Mother Earth, for sleeping in. They eat at fast-food restaurants instead of preparing traditional meals such as mutton and grilled cactus. As Help explained, her children speak in Navajo when it’s convenient, like when they’re at a store and don’t want others to understand what they’re saying. But for her, growing up Navajo looked a lot different.

“We herded sheep, took care of livestock. We didn’t have propane. We would boil beans and cook livestock on charcoal,” she said. “Now, everyone has propane. Everyone has electric stoves.”

It’s hard to say what has caused this cultural shift.

Dempsey thinks parents who lived through the boarding school era don’t want their children to feel as uncomfortable as they did. Navajo adults say they felt dislocated with English as their second language, and many say they were abused, physically and mentally, in the schools. And Help thinks it takes a lot of energy for parents to keep up these traditions. Sometimes, she says, it’s just easier for them not to. The young people look at it more simply.

“Tradition is different now than it was,” said Aubrey Smith, a 21-year-old student at University of New Mexico.

“It’s changing, and it always will. You can either fight it, or you can go with it.”

While picking pinons, or pine nuts, April explained her theory: “I think it’s because of the people that we are losing our culture, not because of the government Westernizing us. The people are choosing to change.”

The people of Navajo Nation are haunted by issues with uranium-contaminated drinking water, housing dilemmas and negative effects of coal mines threatening to reopen. Many are suffering from multiple ailments such as cancer, infections and organ failure. Others are living in substandard ghousing conditions and have been for more than 40 years. For decades, they feel they have been completely ignored. They feel invisible to both the Navajo and federal governments.

They are the people of Navajo Nation; they are those who make up the Forgotten People organization.